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Lot Essay
The present work is an exquisite and powerful example of Sutherland's mid-1930s response to the Pembrokeshire landscape. It was included in the 2005 Sutherland exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
'Commentators have tended to follow the lead of the artist, who attached great significance for the development of his art to his discovery of the two headlands projecting on either side of St Bride's Bay [Pembrokeshire]' (see Exhibition catalogue, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2005, p. 13).
Sutherland himself wrote in his famous Welsh Sketch Book of 1942, 'It was in 1934 that I first visited Pembrokeshire. I was visiting a country, a part of which, at least, spoke a foreign tongue, and it certainly seemed very foreign to me, though sufficiently accessible for me to feel that I could claim it as my own ... The quality of light here is magical and transforming - as indeed it is in all this country. Watching from the gloom as the sun's rays strike ... one has the sensation of the after tranquillity of an explosion of light; or as if one had looked into the sun and had turned suddenly away ... it was in this area that I learned that landscape was not necessarily scenic, but that its parts have an individual figurative detachment. I found that this was equally true of other places which I visited later; but the clear, yet intricate construction of the landscape of the earlier experience, coupled with an emotional feeling of being on the brink of some drama, taught me a lesson and had an unmistakable message that has influenced me profoundly' (ibid., p. 70).
'Commentators have tended to follow the lead of the artist, who attached great significance for the development of his art to his discovery of the two headlands projecting on either side of St Bride's Bay [Pembrokeshire]' (see Exhibition catalogue, Graham Sutherland, Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits, 1924-1950, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2005, p. 13).
Sutherland himself wrote in his famous Welsh Sketch Book of 1942, 'It was in 1934 that I first visited Pembrokeshire. I was visiting a country, a part of which, at least, spoke a foreign tongue, and it certainly seemed very foreign to me, though sufficiently accessible for me to feel that I could claim it as my own ... The quality of light here is magical and transforming - as indeed it is in all this country. Watching from the gloom as the sun's rays strike ... one has the sensation of the after tranquillity of an explosion of light; or as if one had looked into the sun and had turned suddenly away ... it was in this area that I learned that landscape was not necessarily scenic, but that its parts have an individual figurative detachment. I found that this was equally true of other places which I visited later; but the clear, yet intricate construction of the landscape of the earlier experience, coupled with an emotional feeling of being on the brink of some drama, taught me a lesson and had an unmistakable message that has influenced me profoundly' (ibid., p. 70).